Peasant Watering her Cow, Evening

In 1866 the Paris dealers Paul Durand-Ruel and Hector Brame offered Millet 30,000 francs a year for the right to everything he painted, and he turned them down. Durand-Ruel bought him anyway, and in 1872 alone he spent nearly 400,000 francs on Millet's pictures. This canvas, painted in 1873 or 1874, went from the studio straight to him. By then the boom was ending. A slump in the French economy left the dealer short of money, and within a few years he had sold it on to a Paris collector named Laurent-Richard. When Laurent-Richard's pictures were auctioned in May 1878, three years after Millet's death, it fetched 15,500 francs, about half of what the painter had once been offered for a whole year's work. The scene is dusk at a pond. A woman wrapped in a hooded cape stands on the bank, leaning on a stick and holding the cow by a rope while it wades in and lowers its head to drink. Beyond the dark ridge the sky is clearing to pale yellow, and in the upper right corner hangs a thin crescent moon.